When the theatre industry gathers this evening at London's Hilton Hotel for the 2004 Olivier Awards, expect Nicholas Hytner's National Theatre to be the most frequently invoked name of the night. With 20 nominations, the National is the clear frontrunner to win Best Play (for Michael Frayn's Democracy) and Best Musical (Jerry Springer - The Opera), and should certainly snap up several more: Bob Crowley's set for Mourning Becomes Electra, for instance.

Hytner took over as artistic director last April and in less than a year has turned the sometimes recalcitrant South Bank complex into a house of hits of an order unmatched by his predecessors. Think of Olivier nominee Kwame Kwei-Armah's Elmina's Kitchen, which was fêted (along with Democracy and Jerry Springer) at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards in November. Or Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman, which no less illustrious a spectator than Stephen Sondheim has been raving about ever since he caught a recent matinee. Or the return of Kenneth Branagh, in a rare sighting on the London stage, in fiery form in David Mamet's Edmond. Or even His Dark Materials, another sellout which, whatever its problems, is nothing if not audacious, especially in an artistic director's first season.

Is Hytner's a one-man fiefdom? No, actually, and certainly not in the style of Trevor Nunn, his predecessor, whose five-and-a-half-year tenure was very much given over to none other than Nunn. In marked contrast, Hytner readily shares the creative wealth, fully aware that any ensuing glory reflects on the theatre as a whole. What is interesting is just how wide a net he has cast in order to make the playhouse tick, even if he chafes at the thought of having a team per se.

Where the National at various times has had no associates at all, Hytner's organisation has two salaried, capital 'A' associates: Howard Davies, 58, who first worked on the South Bank under Peter Hall and has been part of every regime since; and Tom Morris, 39, a writer and impresario with a hotline to much of Britain's less traditional theatre forms and talent. In addition, the building now hums to the advice, chat, and debate of 16 unsalaried 'associates', who gather fortnightly in different combinations to talk shop and trade notes: the director Katie Mitchell, lighting designer Mark Henderson, and the playwrights Mark Ravenhill and Patrick Marber are among those on this list. Then there are the different department heads: executive director Nick Starr - at 46 a year younger than Hytner - who has worked at the National in the press office and as head of planning and rejoined the building 18 months ago at Hytner's behest; the developmental Studio, down by the Cut, which is run by Lucy Davies and Natasha Bucknor, and the literary department, whose 1,000 scripts a year pass through Jack Bradley, Laura Gribble and their team.

'It's a very collegial affair,' says Hytner, who is equally capable, he notes deadpan, of 'taking a decision unilaterally, immediately and instantly'. (The decision to stage The Pillowman was one of those.) But the ready flow of discussion means that, although the buck inevitably stops with Hytner, numerous other voices do get heard. His Girl Friday, the second of four plays in last year's £10 Travelex season, one of the primary achievements of Hytner's still-young tenure, was instigated by associate Alex Jennings, who ended up being in it.

And it was Nick Starr several years ago who took Nick Hytner to the Battersea Arts Centre to see whether Hytner might be interested in directing Jerry Springer - The Opera, in which Starr at the time had a commercial interest. 'It was bad timing for Nick as a director but very good timing for him as a future producer,' recalls Starr, insofar as the evening planted the seeds of the production that became the early talking point of Hytner's regime. The story also illustrates the ready flow of information, awareness and talent that distinguishes the National right now.

The visit to Battersea was doubly productive. Hytner subsequently poached its leader, Tom Morris, to come aboard the ship that the National is often said to be. 'In the end,' says Hytner, 'I'm not going to let anything happen which I don't personally feel is eminently worth doing, but there are certainly kinds of plays which my associates get and understand more than I do.' Morris can speak to those, as has Mark Ravenhill, who was on hand to regale one of the associates' meetings with the virtues of the show Dance Bear Dance from the theatre troupe Shunt.

And before you knew it, says the literary department's Bradley, 'we were going to a railway bridge under Beth nal Green', the site of the performance collective's career-defining show.

'People feel in a safe environment where they can say anything,' says Bradley, who was hired by Richard Eyre in 1994 and has been there ever since. 'You start talking about Sam Shepard, and the next thing you know, you're doing David Mamet's Edmond ,' the Edward Hall-Kenneth Branagh revival that was arguably the hottest ticket of the inaugural £10 season. And why not, says Katie Mitchell, whose production last summer of Three Sisters reclaimed Chekhov's play for keeps. 'Nick needs a broad base of work; therefore it's wise, isn't it, to let other people's passions in?' As Howard Davies, whose late-autumn staging of O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra rivalled Three Sisters as revival of the year, says: 'The extraordinary thing about Nick is that, if you were cynical, you would say he has no taste because he's been completely catholic and inclusive.' The truth, of course, is that such inclusivity - very much the word of choice in my conversations with a dozen or so people about Hytner's still-young regime - serves as its own best definition of taste. After all, the more people you invite to the party, the greater the celebration.

To that extent, the champagne - no, this is the state-funded National: let's say cava - must have been coursing by Waterloo Bridge over the past year, and one can imagine how different the scenario might have been. Richard Eyre's recently published diaries, National Service , give a highly readable and vivid account of the potentially prolonged anxiety of anyone holding such a crucial job, whether or not (like him) you were on Prozac, while Peter Hall in his diaries testifies to a life of virtually non-stop combat: union battles, theatre closures, high-profile flops (the musical Jean Seberg ) though, as far as I can recall, no drugs. (Hytner has yet to allow us a glimpse of his medicine cabinet.) And although Eyre's regime in particular went on to multiple glories, it got off to a halting start and was followed by a Nunn tenure deemed, with one or two exceptions, to be far better on classics than new plays (anyone remember Stephen Poliakoff's Remember This?) and top-heavy with time-honoured Broadway musicals.

Hytner directed one of the defining Broadway musical revivals in NT history: Carousel in 1992, which went on to Broadway, where it won four Tony awards. So it seems especially bold of him to be downplaying that genre - though the early Stephen Sondheim show A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum does get a look-in this summer - in favour of new musicals and new, not always classifiable theatrical forms. 'Nick's open to ideas, and he has a good eye,' says Jerry Springer - The Opera co-producer Jon Thoday. And though Jerry Springer might seem a no-brainer in retrospect, that's to forget the concern in some high-ranking NT funding circles about launching a new regime with a show that exalts the F-word and sings of being thrown, chocolate-coated, to lesbians. In fact that, says Hytner, 'seems to me to be precisely the point. It delighted me that Jerry was in repertory with Three Sisters ' - which may be one of the reasons why the same musical, since displaced to the West End, doesn't any longer quite have the same frisson. Some found Jerry Springer in poor taste. Many more responded to the burst of creative adrenaline that it represents. In any case, since it is often said that taste is who you assemble around you, that is one area where Nunn's NT - an institution notably lacking in Hytner's pool of ad hoc advisers - was found wanting. As an expres sion of one man's ability to gather resources unto himself, Nunn's regime was in some ways antithetical to the setup under Hytner, who, in any case, is himself a very different creature. 'The thing about Nick is he has absolutely no side, no ego,' said the director's own mother, Joyce Hytner, whom I bumped into over lunch at the Wolseley earlier this week. 'He's complicated, but not in that way.'

Tom Morris had only been in his job as associate director for two days when I spoke to him about Hytner, but his perception is acute. 'The standard template in a theatre is, the artistic director is brilliant but paranoid and is always treading a line between their own creative ability and their own paranoia about other people's ability.' Morris goes on: 'The extraordinary thing about Nick is, he just isn't like that. He instinctively bypasses his competition instinct or his competition reflex. That means that if an idea comes up for a kind of theatre that he has no experience of making himself, and if he finds it exciting, he just says yes.' All of which must surely account for what Lucy Davies refers to as the National's 'huge feeling of fresh energy and rigour; this is a really broad church'.

Is it all just a bit too good to be believed? The point is, even the NT's misfires to date haven't been severe: Richard Jones's autumn revival of Tales from the Vienna Woods got pretty rotten reviews, but its relatively few performances (32 in all) limited the box office damage. The Travelex venture kept up attendance in the Olivier, always the toughest of auditoria to make work, and brought in an audience one-third of whom had previously never been to the National. That, in turn, ups the ante for those who know the building well. 'Our work's going to have to be very good to sustain that audience,' says Katie Mitchell. 'It's up to us as artists to produce work they want to see.' Luckily, the can-do atmosphere only amplifies the creativity. Mitchell, for one, has been at the Studio workshopping a theatrical realisation with a cast of six of the Virginia Woolf novel, The Waves , while plans are still embryonic for a spring 2005 Strindberg project that would for the first time link the National with Tate Modern, its Thames-side neighbour further east. Although appearances might suggest otherwise, not every incoming show is by David Hare, an NT regular who was conspicuously absent from the building during the Nunn years but has returned to the point of origin of such plays as Plenty, Racing Demon, and Skylight with a vengeance: The Permanent Way, already in the rep, gets promoted to the Lyttelton in the spring; his new play Stuff Happens concludes this year's Olivier £10 season, and then there's his new version of Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba, to be directed by Davies early in 2005.

But can the current spate of successes last? (Nick Starr says that, 'After four hits, I remember saying, I don't recall this run of luck before.') 'You never feel confident,' says Hytner. 'You always feel the next one is the one that's going to empty the place; you always feel two flops away from disaster,' which is where Nunn's penchant for big musical revivals made brilliant financial sense. Still, if appearances are to be believed, let Katie Mitchell have the last word. 'I said one day to Nick, "You know, Richard [Eyre] used to cry on the way to work, according to his memoir," and I looked into Nick's eyes and I thought, you're not crying - at least it didn't look as if he was.' In which case, let's just call it a triumphant instance of having a dry eye in the house.

Hits and hopes

The National's big winners last year

Scenes from the Big Picture
Owen McCafferty's slice of Belfast life launched the Hytner regime with a bang.

Jerry Springer, the Opera
Scabrous, irreverent and hilarious.

His Dark Materials
Wildly ambitious and hideously complicated but Hytner pulled it off. Returns next Christmas.

Democracy
Michael Frayn's political drama is heading to Broadway.

Elmina's Kitchen
Kwame Kwei-Armah's provocative and assured story of life in Dalston's 'Murder Mile'.

Henry V
Hytner's anti-war production featured a magnificent performance from Adrian Lester as the king.